Achievement (Not) Unlocked

Something that has been a big inclusion in modern gaming is achievements. As with most things this hides some deeper issue with the industry as a whole. Achievements are basically just used for bragging rights and serve no real purpose, unless you really really want that 1-3% rebate from Microsoft's live market. Companies like Microsoft have attached a "gamerscore" to the idea, adding up points received with achievements and rewarding Xbox live gold members with minor prizes worth about $.25, which is kinda shitty considering to get to that point you would need to play and completely beat 20 games minimum. An added requirement for these "rewards" is that you have to pay Microsoft for the pleasure of getting that 1-3% rebate, as only people with Gold Live memberships can get them. By the way a gold membership costs $9.99 a month or $59.99 for a full year, so you would end up needing to buy 10 $60 games in a month (or just 5 if you have the year long subscription) to make up for the loss from the membership cost. Alternatively, if you don't want to buy shit tons of games, you could just not pay and have more money to spend on a steam sale or something. You can also get points to spend on games in the live market, but once again these rewards are kind of negligible considering you need to pay to get them.

So anyway, back on topic: there are people who let the concern with their gamerscore choose what games they play. That article I linked is about a person addicted to getting achievements, and it displays the main problem I have with them rather well. Achievements control how gamers play games and that removes from the overall experience. Achievements feel as though the game company decided that it needed to wave a carrot in front of our faces to guide us along the best way of playing through a game. The best games act as a medium for storytelling, i.e. most RPGs, or as a great distraction for the player, i.e. one of any number of FPSs. Movies have the same basic goals in a lot of ways. Movies try to tell a good story, make a point, or just be a cathartic distraction from reality, but there are no achievements for having seen The Godfather trilogy because that would be stupid. The subjective experience is the important bit. You don't see directors and writers sitting in an audience telling them the way they should watch and interpret a movie. It is their job to nudge you in the direction they want you to go in a non-forceful, engaging way. I would argue that good game design does this as well.

Achievements seem to add extra goals for you to achieve as well as "rewarding" you for completing certain stages of the game. I kinda get the extra goals thing, most games want players to play the game for as long as possible so adding more goals on top of the main game is an easy way to do that, but this was something that happened before achievements were a thing. Did you ever play Super Mario 64? There was a non-essential quest in the game to get all 120 stars hidden in the game. If you did this you got an extra scene at the end of the game, 100 lives, and no fall damage from falling from your triple jump. So by giving the player a goal outside the bounds of the main storyline it accomplished the same goal as an achievement, but differs in a major way because it added to the game. Sure it was kind of a crappy reward considering you had already played the shit out of the game at that point, but it was something. In the Saints Row games (at least from 2 and forward) there was an in-game list of challenges that rewarded you with in game guns, vehicles, and power ups that could only be obtained if you had the genuine skill to complete the challenges. Though these got linked with achievements later, the key aspect of them was still essentially to provide benefit to the player by expanding game play. Achievements don't add shit, they just get tacked on as a way of showing off.

Because of achievements games are becoming more goal oriented and the focus of the gamer shifts from caring about the story, just looking for a distraction, or trying to have fun; to trying to show off how many achievements they can get. I am being hyperbolic here, but only slightly. We live in a world where individuality is incredibly important and largely determined by a person's role in a group. People self identify with a group and then try to show that they are the person most representative of the positive aspects of that group. They scream "Look at my gamerscore! I am the BEST GAMER EVER!". I find this sad for a couple of reasons, the amount of time "wasted" playing games not among them. First of all it denigrates the people working on the game. Why write a good story if gamers are only going to run through it just to get their gamerscore higher? The even sadder part is, by adding the socializing aspect to the game you are exacerbating the perceived need for superiority within the group. This is the way that you show you are a gamer now. It's telling people that if they don't play the game in the way that the people who determine achievements want, then they are not just not a gamer, but that they aren't having fun in the right way. And fuck them for telling me how to escapism.